Saturday, June 25, 2011

The Linguistics of Bugs Bunny

We can infer that Bugs Bunny's native language probably has a small phoneme inventory, so that most utterances in Bunnese would be longer than their counterparts in English (as his first statement is). I always thought this was clever and it probably is one of the things that interested me at an early age in how languages differ.

There's also a great Porky Pig cartoon where Porky insists to Daffy Duck that "buenos dias" just means "bonjour" and vice versa. The self-referentiality of this implies through comedy that something like Pinker's mentalese must exist, but I can't find the clip.

Words to Live By

"...there is good and bad speculation, and this is not an unparalleled activity in science...Those scientists who have no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and have a lot of fun." - Dan Dennett